Capricorn and Cancer

by Geoffrey Household

  In the morning he felt better. The shadow in the corner of his eyes had gone. He decided that he hadn’t felt so well for a long time. That was what came from self-control, from really knocking off the drink. He had a pet, too. As soon as the others had gone to breakfast he played with it. It seemed quite tame, but stayed always out of reach of his hand.

  When the cable manager came back, Avellion showed it to him.

  ‘Look at him!’ he said. ‘Animals know whom to trust.’

  ‘Look at what?’

  ‘Here, man, here! See him?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Little black rat. His Majesty’s rat! Look at him.’

  The cable manager did not always appreciate jokes. He was therefore unduly willing to accept them when they were not there.

  ‘Very good! Very good!’ he said with an embarrassed laugh, and trotted away to take his exercise.

  Several people watched, disturbed, the flitting of Mr Avellion’s hands and listened to the endearing terms in which he spoke to the invisible; but he looked sane, though unshaven, and they gave him the benefit of the doubt—an eccentric passing the hours of idleness in his own way, with, undoubtedly, the help of a secret bottle.

  In a dream Avellion waited for Malta. There was nothing clear in his brain but a longing and a prohibition. ‘It will be all right when you get to Malta,’ he said to himself. ‘Do nothing till you get to Malta.’ Desire was no longer so simple that it could be defined as wanting a drink. At Malta there would be an end to unknown agony.

  The colonel sat down by Mr Avellion. He did not know what was wrong, or indeed if there was anything seriously wrong at all. He talked very casually with the eccentric businessman, and at last, as a good regimental officer, he understood and he admired the rat. He also said that Malta was in sight. Mr Avellion began to weep. He then screamed luxuriously, and kept on screaming while the colonel led him to the sick bay.

  Mr Avellion got his whisky, but it was of little interest to him. He even reached Malta, or at least the launch which came out to carry him to hospital. The ship reported him as a case of delirium tremens caused by a habitual drinker’s sudden want of alcohol. There were plenty of such cases in the books, due to poverty or isolation in desert or at sea. The ship was doubtful whether d.t. could be caused by sheer courage, but could give no other explanation of Mr Avellion’s abstinence and death.

  2

  The Idealist

  HE still used to finger his captain’s uniform and wonder how the devil he had got into it without a major interruption of his life. There had been, of course, a sudden rush of unfamiliar incidents, but no break in the continuity of the self and the work which he knew, no chrysalis period of military training. At one moment he had been manager of a fleet of barges on the gentle Severn; at the next he was an army captain running lighters in a Mediterranean aflame with war. A deputy Assistant Director of Transportation they called him. It seemed a long title. He was used to being called the Young Boss. His father was the Old Boss.

  And here he was in Piraeus Harbour, emptying into his barges the holds of the freighters which raced up from Alexandria; unloading on the quay or—if the weather were kind—at little ports on the other side of the Corinth Canal; storing and stacking; managing his Greek lightermen with the aid of a foreman who, sober, much resembled his old Severn-side foreman drunk; and commanding his small detachment of military through a sergeant-major who was the recoil mechanism between himself and the Army. The sergeant-major took and distributed the shocks so that the Young Boss—no, Captain Coulter, of course—could go on doing his job without disrupting the still unintelligible organisation of which he was a part.

  Sergeant-Major Wrist was, in the eyes of Coulter, a character straight out of Kipling—pliant, resourceful, with as neat and tough a body as if he had polished and brushed it along with his equipment for twenty-five years of morning parades. He had managed to stay alive through one war already—not to speak of several expeditions which he described as picnics—and he freely expressed his intention of staying alive through this one. Coulter liked that. It was a proper old-soldierly way to talk. He felt that Wrist was wasted on a non-combatant job in the docks, and was sure that he must have pulled every possible regimental string to avoid it.

  Their life of mere hard work was not, however, likely to continue undisturbed. That morning, April 6, 1941, Hitler had declared war on Greece. It was the end of five uncannily peaceful months while the Greeks fought only Italians, and the base had been free to pour in the seaborne supplies from Egypt. Coulter did not think the Germans were likely to bomb Athens. Their pedantic minds would conceive that, at least, as sheer barbarism. But they were bound to have a shot, instantly, at knocking out the Piraeus.

  He was still in his dockside office when the stroke came, alone with the sergeant-major who never objected—especially when they had first had an informal meal together and some drinks—to staying at leisurely work up to any hour of night. There was very little warning. When the sirens screamed, Sergeant-Major Wrist at once enjoined his Captain to take refuge in the concrete shelter beneath the quay. Those, he said, were the Orders. A minute later, when they were at the door of the shelter, the raid began.

  Coulter let the sergeant-major pop into the burrow, and himself stayed above ground and watched. This then was war. Flame. Noise. Space geometry of searchlights and tracer. The upward flowering of explosions. The hammering and tinkling and whining of bits of metal. A mind quite arbitrarily prepared to lay long odds that its body stood in empty air between flying objects.

  He was fascinated both by the scene and by the fact that his curiosity seemed to be greater than his fear. He had been just too young for the first war, and all his life had been envious of that experience which had destroyed a fifth of his near contemporaries at school. At the age of seventeen he had been conditioned to the prospect of death. Three weeks was the average fighting life of a British infantry subaltern on the western front, and he had been disappointed that he was just too young to take the gamble.

  He knew all right that he had been a young fool—it had seemed to him in peace utterly incredible, this desire to immolate oneself for the sake of excitement—and yet, when a second war came along, it appeared that he was merely an older fool. He could perfectly well have been running barges in the unraided Severn instead of a port which—if there were anything in all the military theories he had read—was doomed to absolute destruction.

  So this was all. Well, but to endure it for three weeks needed, no doubt, such sustained courage that one might welcome the end foretold by the military actuaries. All the same, it was exhilarating to find—after twenty years of wondering about it—that one wasn’t particularly afraid. Coulter was annoyed at himself for this sudden vanity. What were a few bombs compared to forcing oneself to jump out of a trench into the steady, calculated fire of 1917. No. No, this wasn’t the real thing.

  It was over in ten minutes. A lucky string of bombs had erased the northern block of sheds and set the s.s. City of Syracuse on fire. Her crew—those few of them who were on board—had tumbled down the ship’s brow and bolted for the dock gates as soon as she was hit. It wasn’t surprising. In her holds were two hundred tons of explosives and ammunition. The ship’s officers of course would know it, though it was possible that the crew, up to the moment they were ordered to clear out, did not. For the sake of security and to avoid the risk of devastating sabotage in a port where there had been German agents at large till the previous night, her cargo was officially described as mere military stores.

  The City of Syracuse did not directly concern Coulter’s office since she was discharging into the railway trucks alongside, not into lighters; but he had heard of the nature of her cargo and assumed that all the British working in the port were equally well informed. Security seemed to him to limit discussion rather than knowledge.

  A naval launch was desperately trying to shift the ship into the outer harbour, but neither man nor rope could e
xist on her flaming bows, and the launch had not the power to tow her stern foremost. When the stern cable charred and broke, the Navy gave up. Very reasonably, too, thought Coulter.

  The sergeant-major took his time in the shelter—and why not, since the all-clear had never sounded?—and missed such excitement as there had been. He now appeared, unruffled, at Coulter’s elbow.

  ‘Gone to fetch a tug, I expect, sir,’ he said, watching the launch scatter red foam from her bows as she slid away from the City of Syracuse into outer darkness.

  ‘Perhaps,’ answered Coulter, giving the Navy the benefit of the doubt. ‘But the nearest tug is in the naval basin. It’ll take her a quarter of an hour to get here, and I think that’s just ten minutes too long.’

  ‘She does seem to be burning pretty fierce, sir,’ Wrist agreed coolly.

  Except for the occasional fountains of flame from the City of Syracuse, the docks were at peace under the moon. The tough central core of the northern sheds stood up sheer from a pile of rubble on which the dust was already settling. There were no troops about, for at that hour of night all of them, except the A.A. gunners, were back to their billets in the town. The duty clerks in the port offices were being marched away. The ambulances had cleared up the few wounded who could readily be found, and gone. The Greek fire brigades were presumably fully occupied in the town, for a glow over distant streets showed where another string of bombs had fallen.

  As Coulter and Wrist turned to go, a staff car raced up the quay and stopped opposite to them. In it were the Area Commander and his Adjutant, perfectly cool, perfectly dressed. God knew what they hoped to do there! If it came to that, thought Coulter, God knew why he was still there himself! Theirs presumably was a moral duty, but he hadn’t any duty whatever. Some of his barges were adrift in the harbour, but he could only let them stay there until the Navy brought a tug.

  ‘Good evening, Coulter,’ said the Area Commander. ‘Barging in again, I see.’

  It was a steady joke, which pleased the Commander very much. Somehow it pleased Coulter, too. It meant, after all, that the Commander recognised him, liked him, knew what he did and appreciated it. And that could stand repetition.

  ‘Anything we can do, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘If I were you,’ said the Area Commander, ‘I should get out of here pretty damn quick. There’s nothing any of us can do.’

  He left his car and passed a pleasant word with the sergeant-major, even exchanging a casual reminiscence as one old soldier to another. Then he walked off on a tour of the docks to assure himself that there was no man in need of help.

  ‘Well, he isn’t taking his own advice, sergeant-major, but we will,’ said Coulter, as if it were a foregone conclusion.

  He started towards his waiting truck. Wrist pointed to the sliced cube of the northern building, outlined against the burning City of Spracuse.

  ‘There was a gun up there, sir,’ he remarked. ‘I suppose they’re all right.’

  It seemed to Coulter exceedingly unlikely that the gun crew would have cleared out leaving any of their number alive on top of the building. Still, it was just possible that the whole lot had been hit and forgotten, and that there might be a survivor in no state to climb down.

  ‘Shall we go and see, sir?’

  What particularly annoyed Coulter was that he knew just where and when his sergeant-major was likely to be a bit of a fraud. Indeed he doubted if you could become a sergeant-major at all without a keen appreciation of the value of eye-wash. He did not believe for a moment that Wrist would have made his intolerable and officious suggestion if it hadn’t been for the presence, somewhere in the docks, of the Area Commander.

  But there it was. That was the way an army fought. That was the value of leadership. Even if Wrist did take good care that there was someone to commend his act of gallantry, it only reflected tremendous credit on the Area Commander who had inspired him. Scamps, these old soldiers? Well, if you liked. But, by God, they made the rules of their own game and enough of them had died at it!

  The sergeant-major gave an indescribable hitch to his whole person, as if he were about to report to the Almighty that all, including his own well-polished soul, was present and correct. He then stepped out smartly towards the northern sheds. No, thought Coulter, of course he wouldn’t run. Running, even forwards, suggested a sense of urgency and panic. That was not the way of the majestically professional British Army.

  Captain Coulter found himself unconsciously lagging half a step behind. That wouldn’t do at all, and he drew up and paced stride for stride with Wrist. He cursed his lack of any military training, aware as never before that he had only been carried along by observing traditions of which he had heard and read, by listening to the sergeant-major, by a romantic enthusiasm for those unrealised three weeks of youth.

  What on earth was an officer expected to do in a case like this? Use his common sense, he supposed. The situation was not, in essence, very different from a pay parade when you followed all the absurd little ceremonies because it was expected of you, because it was that way a soldier liked to work. Alternatively, it was doubtless in his power to order the sergeant-major to drop this folly. Or he could go to ground in any solid cover there might be, and charitably watch Wrist trying to win his D.C.M. There was nobody looking to see what he did himself.

  ‘Oh, blast!’ Coulter thought. ‘I am looking.’

  He found that he had grumbled the words half aloud, and was startled by his own voice as much as by his superb and unexpected arrogance.

  ‘Sir?’ asked the sergeant-major.

  ‘Nothing. What the hell of a lot of bricks there are in four walls!’

  They clambered over the rubble of the shed, keeping the mound so far as possible between themselves and the waves of heat from the City of Syracuse. To Coulter’s right was the line of railway trucks waiting for the cargo they were about—and instantaneously—to receive. For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful. Some of them had been loaded that afternoon. No stencilling on the boxes to indicate the contents. Security. Damned soldiers had learned that much if nothing else. At the tail end of the train, where there were neither building nor rubble between sidings and ship, the wood of the trucks was smouldering.

  The flames over the City of Syracuse had died down. The plates of her upper works were red and the paint was curling off like wood shavings. All of her above the main deck was spurting and glowing. A subsidence or a melting anywhere would drop the furnace into the holds.

  The cube of shed left upright was about thirty feet high. It stood because it had been reinforced to take the weight of the concrete gun platform on the roof.

  ‘This will get us up, sergeant-major.’

  A long strip of iron railing had been hurled against the trucks. It did not look as if it had fallen from anywhere, but as if it had been preserved on the ground for some calculable event of peacetime—to rail off the crowds at an embarkation of the royal family, or to fence a bit of welcoming garden in front of the customs-house. They upended the railing with some difficulty and leaned it against the wall for a ladder.

  The heat of the burning ship seared eyes and face as Coulter looked over the top. On the platform was the gun, pointing at the scorched foremast of the City of Syracuse and partly wrenched from its mountings. There were two great-coats, forming a vaguely human-shaped pile which aroused and disappointed the gallant zeal of the sergeant-major. There were the long slender Bofors shells ready arranged to be seized by their partners in the complicated dance of loading. The place was deserted. Well, what else could you expect? The officer in charge would have ensured—and of that Coulter had all along been certain—that none of his men was left up there alive.

  ‘Time we were going, sergeant-major,’ he said irritably.

  ‘We’ll just have a look-round in the rubble, sir.’

  ‘All right. It’s possible of course.’

  And he dutifully searched the hollows and dark corners where one
of the gunners might have been blown. By this time he had become such a fatalist that he was jesting with the sergeant-major. To himself he said: chum, you won’t know a damn thing about it if the ship goes up, so why worry?

  He clung to that unreasonably comforting thought until such time as Sergeant-Major Wrist decided that honour was at last satisfied.

  Coulter offered him a cigarette, and walked back to his truck which was parked outside the port offices. He could have run now with a clear conscience, but it did not seem worth while. He was neither courageous nor cowardly; he was just empty.

  As they drove out of the dock gates, he said to the sergeant-major:

  ‘Well, Mr Wrist, if there are many chaps like you among the old regulars, I suppose we might win the war after all.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ replied the sergeant-major complacently. ‘There’s one thing we’re taught early, if I may say so, sir, and that’s our duty to look after the men, sir.’

  They had gone half a mile from the docks when the City of Syracuse blew up. The blast cut a swathe through the houses packed on the hill above the port, but on the open sea front, along which they were driving, buildings merely spilled all their windows on to the pavement as neatly as if a stage set had fallen flat. Then a vast bulk, blacker than the night, swooped out of the sky before them and hurled up a water-like spout of trees, earth and grass as it plunged into a little public park at the cross-roads.

  ‘Gawd, what was that?’ the sergeant-major yelled.

  ‘Must be the whole forepart of the City of Syracuse,’ Coulter answered, fascinated by such a colossal show of violence.

  The bows and forecastle had pitched right way up, and immediately looked as if they had been on the site for years—a fitting decoration for the park of a seafaring people.

  ‘Gawd!’ exclaimed the horrified sergeant-major again. ‘She must have been full of ammo, and me muckin’ about alongside like a bleedin’ good Samaritan!’